Sustainability in an Imaginary World

Art and the Question of Agency

David Maggs, John Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000027112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Sustainability in an Imaginary World explores the social agency of art and its connection to complex issues of sustainability.

Over the past decade, interest in art's agency has ballooned as an increasing number of fields turn to the arts with ever-expanding expectations. Yet just as art is being heralded as a magic bullet of social change, research is beginning to throw cautionary light on such enthusiasm, challenging the linear, prescriptive, instrumental expectations such transdisciplinary interactions often imply. In this, art finds itself at a treacherous crossroads, unable to turn a deaf ear to calls for help from an increasing number of ostensibly non-aesthetic fields, yet in answering such prescriptive urgencies, jeopardizing the very power for which its help was sought in the first place.

This book goes in search of a way forward, proposing a theory of art aiming to preserve the integrity of arts practices within transdisciplinary mandates. This approach is then explored through a series of case studies developed in collaboration with some of Canada's most prominent artists, including internationally renowned nature poet Don McKay; Italian composer and Head of Vancouver New Music, Giorgio Magnanesi; the renowned Electric Company Theatre, led by Kevin Kerr; and finally through a largescale multimedia installation aiming to reimagine the relationship between climate, culture, and human agency.

Sustainability in an Imaginary World will be of great interest to students and scholars of arts-based research fields, sustainability studies, and environmental humanities.

Part I

Realigning the art–sustainability relationship

1 An introduction to Sustainability in an Imaginary World

Introduction

This book is about the relationship between art and sustainability. It is being written at a time when that relationship is increasingly being celebrated and consummated, but often for reasons and in ways that, we argue, are problematic. Indeed, we believe that the increasingly popular instrumental use of art in the service of sustainability carries a two-fold danger. First, mis-identifying the nature of the sustainability problem itself, and, second, undermining the very reason art is such a powerful part of many people’s lives. While there are certainly compelling traditions of aesthetically driven explorations of sustainability, our concern lies with the rapid expansion of prescriptive, instrumental engagements in recent years.

In response, we have spent the past decade attempting to develop a new path that might bring these elements together. Can we move away from typically linear, instrumental interactions and towards what we consider to be a more urgent calibration of sustainability challenges, coupled with a more idiomatic understanding of the larger social agency of art? This has involved rethinking how we approach complex problems like sustainability, it has inspired us to identify a concise and clear sense of the social agency of art, and it has landed us in the humbling space of putting these ideas into practice. Part I of this book outlines the theoretical convictions we have fashioned in support of this work, and Parts II and III explore how well these ideas hold up in a series of practical explorations.

As will become evident, this work plays out within a thoroughly Western perspective. While in part this stems from the obvious limits of our own identity and experience, the focus does rest on deeper necessities. Many of the issues and domains driving this larger turn to art from a diversity of perspectives—health, mental health, sustainability, social justice, for example—might be considered artefacts of Western rationality. These are problems which are heavily structured by Western, Modernist ways of knowing the world, with its stark separations between culture and nature, between subjects and objects, and between values and facts.

The age of the Anthropocene is upon us. Not coming eventually but unfolding around us everywhere we look. The hallmark of this age is entanglement, a complex interaction of social, technical, and natural forces lurking within its phenomena. If Modernist dichotomies ever had any legitimate purchase on the world they are desperately faltering now. The differences between the maps they incline us to draw and the territories they strive to represent are increasingly difficult to ignore. Rather than continuing to secure increasing levels of certainty, command, and control over the world, they offer growing uncertainty, indecision, and disempowerment instead.¹ Rather than a challenge for Western, Modernist rationality, it seems increasingly clear that the sustainability crisis entails a challenge to such rationality. As Alfonso Montuori says, “the problems are so radical, they require stepping beyond the present ways of thinking.”²

One vital and growing approach to this circumstance has been the effort to diversify cultural perspectives, to seek insight from non-Western thought as a means to escape the pathologies of a cultural mindset at the end of its rope. We see the value of this in a country like Canada with its increasing efforts to incorporate indigenous thought in a growing number of contexts while at the same time loosening a Western hegemony to include the many non-Western views that now make up the fabric of this nation.

But this crucial effort to diversify and indigenize in the face of increasing complexity does not eliminate the need to engage with, and constructively critique, powerful Western ways of thinking and acting, which still continue to exert disproportionate influence on our world. Rather, we find it essential to interrogate the underlying, axiomatic, and often entirely invisible assumptions about the nature of reality inherent in this framework, in order to identify both the difficulties these present along with the opportunities that might emerge to avoid their consequences.

In using the term ‘the West’ or ‘Westernized,’ we are seeking to identify contexts that have been conditioned by ideas and practices that grew out of post-Enlightenment Western Europe—contexts in which themes of objectification, atomization, rationalization, industrialization, and commercialization factor heavily.³ A mechanistic instinct about the nature of reality tends to promote exploitative relationships with self, world, and other, fostering reductive habits of mind that pursue linear approaches to descriptive and prescriptive aspects of problem solving.⁴ This is not, however, an attempt to universalize such traits and ignore the endless nuances of any context deemed ‘Western.’ Rather the hope is to identify and engage pervasive themes commonly found therein.

In wishing to dig at the roots of Western thought, we pursue a critical evaluation of its traditions, particularly as they pertain to the origins and responses to sustainability. Yet our goal is not to demonize its lifeworlds or worse, preclude any meaningful engagement with them. Our goal is to examine the nature of sustainability challenges along with the capacities of arts practices as they are typically understood within a Western context in the hopes of understanding the progressive and transgressive opportunities such interactions represent.

Part I Realigning the art–sustainability relationship

This effort begins in Chapter 2 with its curiosity as to what kind of problem sustainability might be. Here we raise this question of whether sustainability is a problem for Modernist rationality or a problem about Modernist rationality. Is sustainability that which is to be solved by present ways of understanding our selves, our worlds, and our larger life projects? Or is sustainability that which has come to challenge these present understandings instead? We explore the possible drivers of this reorientation through the crumbling rationality of sustainability’s subjects and objects—that is, the loss of the ‘rational individual’ as meaningful unit of engagement and the loss of the ‘natural object’ as a functional unit of analysis. The implications of these losses bring us from a sustainability challenge shaped by objective descriptions of planetary urgencies, to one inspiring deep reflexivity regarding underlying dimensions of self and world. Sustainability, that is, as an agent of metamorphosis.

This reconsideration of sustainability moves us away from its faltering standard approaches, where science outlines its problem and other measures are enlisted to make people care. Such a dynamic has structured most public engagement within sustainability over the past few decades, much of the art– sustainability relationship included. What new possibilities emerge once sustainability has shifted away from its Modernist framings? How might fields like the arts engage its controversies once calibrated in deeply cultural terms?

Chapter 3 begins with its own curiosity as to the recent explosion of interest in instrumental uses of art—art, that is, as something of a ‘magic bullet’ of social change. Here we identify a tension between the potential benefits this represents to arts-based research activities, and the potential risks it poses to arts practices themselves. With the value of art being adjudicated beyond artistic idioms, our exploration begins with an often-ignored question: why do we think art has agency? To this we propose an autopoietic explanation, a self-producing belief in the transformative power of art. This, we suggest, inclines towards the prescriptive, a tacit conviction that gives rise to instrumental ambitions that tend to fail in both directions, as art and as instrument to its non-aesthetic purposes.

Here we find the arts teetering at a major crossroads in Western societies. With so much urgent interest from ostensibly non-aesthetic fields, the arts cannot possibly turn their backs on the world through some ‘autonomy of art’ argument. Yet so often they end up stripped of their essential capacities in becoming an instrumental means to various non-aesthetic ends, risking a different, yet equally devastating cost. How do we navigate this treacherous circumstance? How do we answer the call from worlds in need, while still remaining the potent social force they require?

A crucial and often surprising absence within the explosion of interest in art as ‘tool’ is any explicit theory of art to accompanying its transdisciplinary adventures. In other words, what is it that we think we are working with when we are working with the agency of art? Reviewing a century of thinking on this question, from Heidegger, Marcuse, Weil, Murdoch, Steiner, Scarry, Latour, Hans Dieleman, Don McKay, and others, we conceive of art as fundamentally an ontological agent. From this, we fashion a concise two-part or ‘dyadic’ theory of art as an essential balance between aesthetic powers of attention and expression so as to clarify strategies for ‘good use’ within transdisciplinary engagements, where both elements of the dyad are explicitly understood and incorporated.

A final chapter within Part I deals with the challenges of bringing the previous two chapters together. In other words, what are the implications of our ‘dyadic’ theory of art for arts-based research practices and other transdisciplinary work with art? This brings us into the heart of an important debate within these fields: the question of quality, of aesthetic merit. Bluntly put, does art need to be good to be useful? Here we outline a particular position on preserving the priorities of aesthetic merit, that is, on preserving the conditions by which art might still strive for quality even within its relations to other non-aesthetic interests and objectives.

Part II Artists of the Floating World

An introductory chapter for Part II identifies our first attempt to put the ideas explored in Part I into practice. In this case, connecting Western art making with the constraints of Modernist dichotomies as a way of linking art to sustainability. In this we sought to inspire artists to link Modernism to both sustainability and their own tradition and practice. Is this a fruitful way to engage artistic processes? What sort of works emerge? What do they say about our larger interests in the links between Modernism and sustainability? Does this create the opportunity to transgress Modernist rationalities?

Here we outline the open-ended commissioning format as our attempt to connect art to non-aesthetic interests without instrumentalizing. We propose an evaluation strategy focused on the art, artistic processes, experience of the artists, and audience appreciation of the works. Perhaps this approach is preliminary to wondering at the larger effects the work has on a broader social context, or perhaps this is as far as evaluation measures should attempt to go in working with the social impact of art (this question gets amplified considerably in the empirical work featured in Part III).

The first response to our approach comes from internationally recognized nature poet Don McKay. The commissioning ideas, with their transgressive aspirations towards Modernism touch on a deep preoccupation with McKay, that is, the relationship between language and experience, the limits of representation. To this, McKay brings an enigmatic self-understanding: “The point of poetry is to use language to demonstrate its own inadequacy.” In other words, to use a method to engage the world that embeds an illustrative self-consciousness of its own limitations. This chapter explores McKay’s poetics for their tensions with Modernism, their efforts, that is, to pull entities out of insuf...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Author biographies
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Realigning the art–sustainability relationship
• Part II Artists of the Floating World
• Part III Sustainability in an Imaginary World
• Bibliography
• Index